Episode Details

Enjoy the video or the transcript below of a little chat that explores the “simple but not easy” answer.

KAREN: Hi, I’m Karen Joy Brown.

KATIE: And I’m Katie Phillips of Supernova Support, a program that supports songwriters in making their best songs.

KAREN: That’s right, damn right. Damn straight. I wanted to have a little conversation with you to just get that beautiful bouncing-off of a community about a concept that I was thinking about. I wrote a little email thing about it to our people, and I realized I’m like, ooh, this is a deeper well than I realized when I mentioned it in the in the email and it’s the question— how do you know a song is done? I realized that something I said in the email missed the mark a little bit because it was almost sounding like a corporate question like…

KATIE: ….Is it ready to go to press!?

KAREN: Exactly, that’s not what I meant. I was thinking, like, what is the goal when we say is a song done, like, what does it even mean that it’s done? Do you want to share about that? How do you feel like a song is done?

KATIE: I feel like I know a song is done when I don’t have to think about it very much when I’m performing it, whether that’s in front of people, or by myself or in my car or whatever, but I’ve embodied it. Almost like memorizing a monologue or something like in a play where there’s no separation between, or a fusion of yourself as who you are and then yourself as a performer, or a song interpreter or whatever it is— a singer, a storyteller.

It’s when the story feels fluid and there’s no road bump. It makes sense, you know? And also even if it’s not just like, a huge, big show-stopping, epic song, even if it’s more reserved or softer, there has to be points in it that are landing pads. Like, there’s certain ideas or concepts or arcs in the story that really have to land in a certain way, and usually the way I can tell is if it makes me laugh or cry.

KAREN: Oh, yes!

KATIE: If I crack myself up or if I make myself cry, or if I get chills. I usually have some kind of physiological response to it.

And then it’s a matter of once you’ve written the song, it could feel done, but then you start to learn it and you realize, oh, this phrase sucks. Like, I keep tripping over it or I can’t remember it to save my life or it feels disconnected from the story. Like, I love the poetry of this line, but it’s not really serving the story or the song.

So I think there’s a lot of ways to test it. I think it’s probably is different for everyone. But I do think that having it feel settled in your body to where you’re not thinking and you can just let it channel through you.

KAREN: Yeah. It feels that when it’s done.

I really appreciate that you got right into that kind of somatic part of it because, I’ll speak for you, one of the things that Katie and I kind of realized when we were coming up with the whole idea for Supernova Support was that some of the ways that we were doing music before when we were performing a lot, we were out there and doing things like, this is what we’re supposed to be doing. It was not necessarily very connected to the body.

There was a lot of disjointedness and a lot of doing this in order to achieve a certain thing. It didn’t always come connected to the body in that way, like, “I’m doing it for a reason and it’s coming from my soul.” I think that that we need to give ourselves the time to connect to our songs in that way somatically— feel it in your bones: this is done.

KATIE: Yeah. I will say with the Bootleg Honeys stuff, like learning other people’s songs, was my favorite part about the band. Getting to be a support person. That was something that was so fun.

KAREN: Yeah.

KATIE: And I think I became really aware of that somatic feeling of when a song felt like it was “done,” even if I hadn’t written it when I was performing it with